Asus takes Gigabyte to court

On Friday, Asus issued a statement that it has filed an official complaint with the Fair Trade Commission of Taiwan and at the same time the company filed a lawsuit against Gigabyte. This whole circus started some time ago with the introduction of Asus's EPU and Gigabyte's DES power saving technologies.

The two companies have had their fair share of clashes over the years, but this story seems to be quite different. From what we know, part of the reason behind what has happened appears to be related to Gigabyte getting a special deal with Intersil, which makes power regulation ICs, among other things.

Gigabyte has based its DES design on an Intersil chip, and if you've seen Gigabyte's DES software you'll notice a small Intersil logo which shows how close the two companies are. Asus, on the other hand, ended up having to develop the EPU which adds an additional chip to Asus's motherboards, but Asus claims a wide range of benefits from its EPU that Gigabyte isn't meant to have.

However, Asus made some rather wild claims about its EPU with ever increasing power saving numbers without any kind of hardware, software or BIOS upgrades to its motherboards in question. Asus made comparisons to Gigabyte's motherboards with DES claiming that its EPU was superior to Gigabyte's solution in several presentations, official or not, all of which made their way online.

Then about two weeks ago Asus revealed some information about its P45 motherboards and an updated version of its EPU, and this presentation contained further defamatory information about Gigabyte's DES technology; and this was the last straw for Gigabyte who decided to retaliate.

A presentation was made which was shown during a press event in Taiwan two weeks ago come Friday, and this was covered by various Websites. In this presentation Gigabyte compared to basic motherboards the Asus P5K SE/EPU and the Gigabyte EP35-DS3L. Both boards feature a 4-phase PWM and Gigabyte claimed that Asus can't do phase switching on this board, as Asus's EPU switches between eight and four phases.

Gigabyte also claimed that Asus's board was slower at maximum power saving, as Asus throttled the board harder to improve the power saving, which meant a huge drop in performance. Further, Gigabyte made a claim that Asus used "questionable quality components" and specifically pointed out some of the solid capacitors on the motherboard which Gigabyte was unable to verify as being Japanese.

There were also pictures of a graphics card with blown capacitors and Gigabyte asking the question "do you want to see this in your PC?" and Asus took this as Gigabyte claiming that Asus use a type of capacitors that will explode. All of this pushed Asus over the edge in return, which led to Asus taking Gigabyte to court.

Now, we doubt there will be a clear winner in the this case, as both have thrown some fudd at each other, but Asus didn't respond to the allegations in a mature way; instead, the company issued statements about its upcoming P45 motherboards with the next generation EPU, which Asus now claims provides 96%+ power efficiency. We find this to be a low blow, and it looks as if Asus is unwilling to stand up to the challenge and prove Gigabyte wrong and instead has to escalate things to the courtroom.